September 23, 2020: The Sierra Club and a coalition of environmental groups filed a lawsuit last week challenging the Trump administration’s latest assault on critical safeguards against oil and gas pollution.
Under the leadership of former fossil fuel lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s EPA took final action to weaken rules that require oil and gas companies to install top-of-the-line equipment and conduct regular surveys to find and fix leaking components at newly installed infrastructure. EPA’s action also deregulated gas transmission and storage equipment and stripped away limits on methane pollution for the entire oil and gas industry. In doing so, EPA slammed the door shut on any opportunity to regulate pollution from sources that were already in the field as of September 2015, which are responsible for the vast majority of the sector’s emissions.
Experts project that EPA’s rollback will result in over 3.3 million metric tons of preventable methane emissions annually-- the equivalent of the annual carbon dioxide emissions of over 60 million cars. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that, pound-for-pound, is 87 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over the first twenty years after it is emitted. EPA’s action will also increase emissions of smog- and soot-forming volatile organic compounds as well as hazardous air pollutants like benzene and formaldehyde, known human carcinogens.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, will argue that EPA’s actions are plainly unlawful under the Clean Air Act and that the agency must fully reinstate and enforce standards issued in 2016 under the Obama administration. The groups also requested that the Court require EPA to continue enforcing methane standards for the full oil and gas industry as this legal challenge proceeds.
“With a rapidly warming planet and the most devastating global pandemic in 100 years, the Trump administration has somehow seen fit to worsen both of these crises by attacking safeguards that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and clean up the air we breathe,” said Attorney Andres Restrepo, a staff attorney with Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. “We will not stand by as Trump’s EPA guts commonsense, low-cost protections against dangerous oil and gas pollution in order to pad the pockets of oil and gas executives. The courts have repeatedly rejected this administration’s attempts to give a free pass to corporate polluters, and we are confident that this will be no exception. That’s why we’re taking Trump and Wheeler to court, and it’s why we expect to win. Our families and communities deserve no less.”